Nuptials and velvet

Hello chums. Sorry for my absence - I know how empty your lives are when I fail to post fascinating fragments of my daredevil existence on a regular basis. But fret ye not for I am here with yet more tales of derring-do to enthral and entertain.

So... ah... right then.

Went to a wedding last weekend. Yet another of my oldest and bestest chums has settled down with the woman of his dreams. Good for them: they are both lovely people who deserve to be obscenely happy together. Jammy bastards.

The weather behaved itself, fortunately: glorious sunshine everywhere rather than the overcast yet unpleasantly close humidity we have experienced this week. I am sat wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts as I write this, all flab and sweaty crevices. Nice. But I digress: the wedding. I lent my vocal chords to the wedding ceremony by reading a short but sweet extract from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (an enormously popular children's tale, apparently, even though I'd never heard of it). I imbued the passage with just the right level of theatricality and pathos even if I do say so myself. At least, people seemed to like it and nobody in the congregation yawned so I must have done quite well. I have to admit that I did spend a lot of time wandering around the church beforehand adopting a variety of highly inappropriate voices as I ran through the extract and caused the best man a great deal of anxiety. A whole new world of connotation opens when the passage is read in a highly camp voice:

"When a child loves you, not only to play with, but really, really loves you, then you become real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the horse, for he was always truthful. "But when you are real you don't mind being hurt."

My only disappointment was that I and the other reader were led to believe that we could perform our readings either from the lectern or the pulpit (the latter of which we both favoured as it appealed to our grandiose desire to lord it over the congregation) but when our time came the vicar directed us both to the lectern. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice lectern, but it weren't no pulpit.

And then everyone adjourned to a countryside restaurant, drank Pimm's on the lawn in the afternoon sunshine and caught up with old friends. All in all a most pleasant engagement. And despite the ever increasing number of children being spawned within my circle of friends, I managed to avoid inadvertently using grotesquely bad language within earshot of a toddler such as "fucktard" or "cuntflap". Result.